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WILKES-BARRE — Gubernatorial candidate Tom Wolf visited Mountain Productions during a campaign stop in the city Thursday, touting the company’s business approach and his plan to create manufacturing jobs.

The Democratic nominee also dismissed attack ads from Gov. Tom Corbett as desperation.

“I think he needs to convince somebody he can make the numbers move appreciably. He can’t do it with his own reputation, so he is going to have do it by trying to tear down mine,” Wolf said, adding the Republican incumbent’s negative strategy “is his only chance.”

The latest Franklin & Marshall College poll had Wolf’s support at 47 percent to Corbett’s 25 percent. A Corbett campaign TV ad this month blames Wolf for new taxes proposed by former Gov. Ed Rendell on home heating oil, electricity and garbage, as well as a 1 percentage point increase in the sales levy.

Rendell proposed those levies in the 2007-08 budget year when Wolf was secretary of revenue in Rendell’s administration.

“I was secretary of revenue, and secretary of revenue in a democracy does not raise or lower anybody’s taxes,” Wolf said Thursday.

The state Legislature didn’t adopt any of the Rendell tax proposals.

“It is comical that Tom Wolf won’t even accept video testimony of Tom Wolf advocating to raise taxes as proof that Tom Wolf does indeed want to raise taxes,” said Chris Pack, communications director for the Corbett campaign.

Wolf and his wife Frances were at the Mountain Productions facility off New Frederick Street in Wilkes-Barre for more than an hour Thursday afternoon. The staging company sets up for more than 400 shows a year all over the country.

Mountain Productions President Jim Evans showed Wolf the company’s operations during a tour. State Rep. Eddie Day Pashinski was also there.

“We have been involved in the last nine Super Bowls,” Evans told Wolf.

“Rock ’n’ roll has come a long way,” Pashinski added.

Eddie Day was Pashinski’s stage name as a rock-band front man. Mountain Productions was founded in 1979 and became the largest staging company in North America after a 1981 job as staging provider for Simon and Garfunkel in New York City’s Central Park.

“We attempt to buy as much as we can from local vendors,” Evans said, adding the company currently has 123 employees.

Wolf compared Mountain Productions to his business in York. Wolf is chairman of his family-owned business, The Wolf Organization Inc., a building-product company specializing in kitchen cabinets.

“I am coming to places like this to say we are really good at making things,” Wolf said. “When you come here, you see what is their strength. They integrate design. They integrate the construction and fabrication of it and even installation of it, which is more than we do. Those are things that you find in manufacturing you can’t do in the model that has the design in one country and the manufacturing somewhere else.”

Wolf discussed his plan to create manufacturing jobs in Pennsylvania, which he said is modeled after a policy in Oklahoma. Under his proposal, manufacturing companies that generate at least $1 million in additional taxable payroll could receive a cash payment from the state of up to 5 percent of new taxable payroll the following year.

To qualify, the new jobs must be full-time with competitive health benefits and have an average wage that equals or exceeds the average in the county in which the company is located. The plan also has “a clawback provision” that requires the return of payments if companies do not maintain the new jobs for five years.

mbuffer@citizensvoice.com

570-821-2073, @cvmikebuffer

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